> My hunch is that if one were to look closely at the funding of roads, one would find that they represent a net subsidy for heavy trucking.
Would you like to calculate how much those tomatoes would cost, if everybody were paying their fair share of road wear?
Even better would be using this as an incentive to expand and improve the quality of the much more efficient rail network (or transport over waterways, where available) to improve the entire supply chain. That would require the government to act in the interest of its people, though, so I don't think we'll see the effects of such a programme too soon if it ever makes it.
Every tax-paying citizen is already paying this heavy price! Only instead of the damage inefficient transport causes to our infrastructure being reflected in our everyday expenses, it's hidden from plain sight in taxes.
The only industry I'd expect to see killed by paying for road damage would be package delivery vans. They're driving long distances with comparatively almost no weight at all for the convenience of not needing to go to a centralized store to pick up your stuff. With the way Amazon and friends have their drivers pee in bottles, I don't see why we should subsidize those vans.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-oct-26-mn-26434...
If there is currently not enough taxes being collected to maintain the roads, then start taxing those who do the most damage. That entity can then amortize the tax over their 300,000 tomatoes.
We could make exemptions for electric vehicles powered by green energy like we do right now for trucks and other large equipment, but that'll mostly hit the poorer populations who can't afford an electric car. Tacking road maintenance costs onto other general goods in the form of taxes disproportionately hits people who try to avoid using a car for the environment and the liveability of their city, for example by taking public transport or a bike.
A future where everyone drives electric is going to be more expensive because of electric car technology. I'd say pay the difference with two different taxes: one for car weight/wheel load, another for pollution through (similarly hefty) gas taxes. Heavy EVs pay extra for the road damage, ICEs pay for their pollution to encourage cleaner cars, and heavy SUVs/pickup trucks pay both.
The cost is already there, it's just extracted through taxes rather than through increased prices of transported goods.
The advantage of shifting maintenance costs over to those creating those costs in the first place is that it allows the market to properly optimize for those costs. If transporting those tomatoes by rail is actually cheaper overall once you factor in road maintenance costs, but you aren't charging those costs to the trucking companies, then they're just going to keep shipping tomatoes by truck even though it's less efficient. The invisible hand of the market cannot optimize for costs it doesn't know about.
But raw data is hard to find
That's fascinating, is there an equation for road wear in relation to vehicle weight and other factors?
--- EDIT ---
Ten seconds after I posted this, I see somebody else also asked this question and there is this link.
https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...
The fourth power rule, I guess it was empirically measured.